TARANTO

Cosenza is on a line of railway which runs northward up the Crati valley, and joins the long seashore line from Taranto to Reggio.  As it was my wish to see the whole of that coast, I had the choice of beginning my expedition either at the northern or the southern end; for several reasons I decided to make straight for Taranto.

The train started about seven o’clock in the morning.  I rose at six in chill darkness, the discomfort of my room seeming worse than ever at this featureless hour.  The waiter—­perhaps he was the landlord, I left this doubt unsolved—­brought me a cup of coffee; dirtier and more shabbily apparelled man I have never looked upon; viler coffee I never drank.  Then I descended into the gloom of the street.  The familiar odours breathed upon me with pungent freshness, wafted hither and thither on a mountain breeze.  A glance upwards at the narrow strip of sky showed a grey-coloured dawn, prelude, I feared, of a dull day.

Evidently I was not the only traveller departing; on the truck just laden I saw somebody else’s luggage, and at the same moment there came forth a man heavily muffled against the air, who, like myself, began to look about for the porter.  We exchanged greetings, and on our walk to the station I learned that my companion, also bound for Taranto, had been detained by illness for several days at the Lionetti, where, he bitterly complained, the people showed him no sort of attention.  He was a commercial traveller, representing a firm of drug merchants in North Italy, and for his sins (as he put it) had to make the southern journey every year; he invariably suffered from fever, and at certain places—­of course, the least civilized—­had attacks which delayed him from three days to a week.  He loathed the South, finding no compensation whatever for the miseries of travel below Naples; the inhabitants he reviled with exceeding animosity.  Interested by the doleful predicament of this vendor of drugs (who dosed himself very vigorously), I found him a pleasant companion during the day; after our lunch he seemed to shake off the last shivers of his malady, and was as sprightly an Italian as one could wish to meet—­young, sharp-witted, well-mannered, and with a pleasing softness of character.

We lunched at Sybaris; that is to say, at the railway station now so called, though till recently it bore the humbler name of Buffaloria.  The Italians are doing their best to revive the classical place-names, where they have been lost, and occasionally the incautious traveller is much misled.  Of Sybaris no stone remains above ground; five hundred years before Christ it was destroyed by the people of Croton, who turned the course of the river Crathis so as to whelm the city’s ruins.  Francois Lenormant, whose delightful book, La Grande Grece, was my companion on this journey, believed that a discovery far more wonderful and important than that of Pompeii awaits the excavator on this site; he held it certain that here, beneath some fifteen feet of alluvial mud, lay the temples and the streets of Sybaris, as on the day when Crathis first flowed over them.  A little digging has recently been done, and things of interest have been found; but discovery on a wide scale is still to be attempted.